A Beginner’s Guide to Product Testing

In order to ensure that your customer is happy, you must first delve into what the customer wants. And what better way to collate that information than from the customer’s mouth itself!

Enter product testing – A guaranteed way to find out what the customer wants.

Now, a product’s journey from ideation to execution is often a lengthy one. It is time as well as resource consuming. So, it is essential to ensure that the product is well received in the market.

When you deploy product testing, you’re essentially implementing a set of practices that can help you mark your product as safe and satisfactory. While there are many ways to conduct product testing, you’re effectively asking a set of participants to use your product or service and then gathering feedback based on their experience.

Types of Product Testing Methodologies

Following are the key types of product testing methodologies:

• Prototype-based product testing – Here, you build a minimum viable product (MVP) or a prototype and test different versions of a design to collect feedback from users.
• Market testing – Also known as soft launch, this type of testing entails deploying your product to a limited audience for a predetermined period to learn how the product is received.
• Usability testing – With this type of testing, you can show your product’s features to users and gather data on how they interact and respond to it.
• Quality assurance testing – This type of testing ensures that the product or service conforms to the desired quality standards and performs as intended.

The feedback provided by customers from these different tests primarily includes data on:

• how the product works,
• problems that arise, and
• how easy it is for them to use the product.

You can then use this information to enhance your products and services and identify potential issues before they cause any widespread trouble.

Additionally, with product testing, you can aim to educate your consumer about the intended purposes of the product and whether it is the best fit for their need.

Benefits of Product Testing

At this juncture, allow me to shed light on some benefits of product testing:

• Improves quality and reliability
  Once you rigorously test your products before deployment, you can rest assured that they’ll be able to deftly sustain in dynamic situations. What’s more, you’ll even be able to identify defects early.
• Lowers overall costs
  When you conduct your product development and testing process hand-in-hand with the customer, you can easily comprehend how it performs in the real world, and map which features are non-essential. This helps you iterate your product to the customer’s needs and save on overall costs.
• Gauges your product’s life expectancy
  It is crucial to understand how long your product is likely to sustain without failure. According to this understanding of the product’s lifespan, you can identify various stages at which maintenance and support is required.
• Lowers product’s aftercare
  As discussed earlier, product testing allows you to predict your product’s problems and where you might need to intervene and provide support. Once adequate preventive maintenance practices are in place, you automatically lower the costs of aftercare and maintenance.In addition to the ones that I’ve mentioned here, there are many benefits to frequently testing your product using qualitative and quantitative research, technical product testers, and focus groups. By incorporating a holistic feedback cycle comprising of these elements, you will be able to avail valuable insights that can help you improve your product.
  The best product testing businesses implement feedback cycles periodically to ensure that their products meet the needs of their target audience!

Tips to conduct tests on marketable products

Here are some tips to conduct comprehensive tests on marketable products:

1. Determine the goal of your product

Formulate your research questions accurately so that you can obtain relevant, standardized information that takes you closer to your desired end product.

2. Decide on a target group

Define a narrow target group as well as appropriate sample sizes, you will be able to garner the most accurate feedback that can help you revise your product in a correct manner.

3. Test during each stage of the product development

Since most research is conducted in a waterfall format wherein each stage is completed before the next one begins; it doesn’t leave much room for modifications. It is thus necessary to conduct testing at every stage in the development process.

4. Go from data to decisions smoothly

Make sure your data capabilities are on point; product testing is all about turning data from user feedback into actionable insight that guides development.

Well, there you have it – the ins and outs of product testing! When it is done correctly, product testing helps your product to meet the required quality and performance standards. It makes finding bugs and saving costs quite a cakewalk.

Reach out to us at Nitor Infotech to learn more about our comprehensive testing services.